The 2017 NASCAR season couldn’t have gone any better for Martin Truex Jr. And off the track, 2018 started with an exciting prize for the ardent Philadelphia Eagles fan.

The New Jersey native won his first NASCAR Cup Series championship. Then he found out he was going to the Super Bowl with a friend from Toyota, and two weeks later the Eagles won the title game.

As the Eagles were defeating the Patriots in Minneapolis in February, he was riding high.

“It was just so exciting to see my favorite team win their first Super Bowl,” he said.

And it came on the heels of his own first title. “Last year was just meant to be for me,” he said.

While everything went right last year for Truex and his team, this season has been a tougher grind. He goes into Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway in sixth place in the standings, just eight points behind fourth-place Brad Keselowski.

Truex’s season started inauspiciously. A late-race wreck doomed him to 18th place in the Daytona 500.

“That’s Daytona for me — restrictor-plate racing,” Truex, 37, said at a NASCAR luncheon Thursday in San Francisco. “It’s been tough over the years (Daytona). It doesn’t matter where I am in the field, if there’s a crash, it’s all around me. Wrong place, wrong time — that’s for sure.”

He bounced back with five straight top-five finishes, including a win at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana (San Bernardino County). He also won at Pocono.

This weekend he’ll try to duplicate his 2013 win at Sonoma, which snapped his 218-race winless streak.

“I remember how awesome it felt because it had been so long and I had been working so hard to get to victory lane,” he said. “Our team (Michael Waltrip Racing) had been so close to winning. It seemed like every time, somebody pulled the rug out from under us. It would be 10 laps to go and a caution would come out and we’d lose spots on pit road. Something like that always happened to us in ’12 and ’13.”

He qualified fifth at Sonoma that year and missed his chance for the pole, he said, because his cool box (air conditioning) caught on fire.

“The car was smoking coming through turn 10,” he said. “Luckily we were able to fix it for the race.”

The Sonoma race is the first of two road-course races on the 38-race schedule.

“Watkins Glen is kind of the speedway of road-course racing, and Sonoma is kind of a short track of road-course racing,” Truex said. “A lot of elevation changes, a lot of slow-type corners, really low-grip asphalt — the tires really wear out.”

In fact, the track is where tires go to die. Such challenges put a premium on driver skill, he said.

“That’s one of the reasons I enjoy it, and a lot of other drivers do as well,” he said. “You have those crazy restarts with two or three (cars) wide for three or four laps in a row.”

The elevation changes through turns 2 and 3 prevent drivers from seeing the exit, he said. “And you’re sideways just about every single lap coming over that crest and spinning the tires. Those types of things area what makes it fun.”

He shared the dais at the luncheon with 16-year-old Hailie Deegan, who will take part in Saturday’s Carneros 200 NASCAR Pro Series West race. Part of the NASCAR Next group of promising young drivers, she is sixth in the standings.

In answer to a question, she said she had gotten her driver’s license. “And I speed everywhere!” she said. Then she noticed that California Highway Patrol officers Marc Renspurger and Andy Barclay were also in attendance at the luncheon. She laughingly backed off her statement.

The officers are among the many first-responders the raceway is recognizing for their work during the fires that devastated much of Sonoma, Napa and Lake counties in October. They will be honored before Sunday’s race, and more than a thousand tickets are being given to families affected by the fires.